Every Wednesday, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association publishes the regional bestseller list. On Thursdays, we celebrate Thursday Themes to shine a spotlight on some of the books from the list and give our brains a different way of thinking about books. This week, several books have a Pacific Northwest connection and are new to Thursday Themes. Whidbey T …
Many booksellers from the Pacific Northwest are in Pittsburgh for the annual American Booksellers Association Winter Institute. Some participants got to tour independent bookstores. When we go to bookstores in different parts of the country and the world, we love to spot PNW authors and illustrators on the shelves. At Riverstone Books in the Squirrel …
This fresh, fun grumpy-sunshine romance is what would happen if Alexis Rose (à la “Schitt’s Creek“) ended up stuck in tiny Westport, Washington. This is my go-to romance recommendation! Is Piper Bellinger spoiled? Yes. Is she lovable? Definitely. Just ask Brendan Taggart, a gruff sea captain who is convinced she won’t last a week outside …
In the small island community of Ebey’s End, life is quiet and sort of “normal” – whatever that is. And then along comes July, newly orphaned and in need of a place to live and grow. That’s where Anita the grocer, July’s sort-of-cousin, comes in. The social worker wants to park 14-year-old July at her …
The publisher describes Patrick Hutchison’s Cabin as a cross between Henry David Thoreau and Bill Bryson. Maybe a cross between “Uh uh, don’t do it” and “Are you out of your freakin’ mind?” is closer. Holding down dead end jobs while trying to launch his writing career is going nowhere. Hutchison spots an online ad, …
Sparks fly in a steamy encounter between Meg and a mystery man on the ferry– but finds out later that that man is Ethan Fine, an environmentalist with plans to convert her community’s decrepit pickleball court into wetlands. As it happens, he’s also a fan of the sport… The ever-growing pickleball has made its way …
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this. But every time I write a book, it’s only at the very end that I find out what it was actually about. Somehow, I’m surprised every single time this happens. I write middle-grade narrative nonfiction, which may seem like it’s straightforward. My books all stem from questions I have or …
HE HADN’T PREPARED me for the house, for how wildly inappropriate a dwelling it was for a man who was in a wheel-chair. Stacked like a tea-tray of sandwiches on a sopping wet hill in Queen Anne, it climbed higgledy-piggledy into a thicket of conifers, and somewhere, up there, among the shaggy, dripping green, was …
A staid academic’s life in the English department is shaken by the appearance of a charismatic younger law professor in this new Seattle-set novel by the author of How to Raise a Feminist Son. The characters separately traverse emotional, professional, and political minefields, guided by protocols of power, gender, and race (he’s white, she’s Pakistani) …
One of the hazards in the fast-growing American cities of the late 1800s was fire, and the Northwest was no exception. Most of us are familiar with the 1889 blaze that reshaped Seattle’s streets, but Spokane fell victim to flame in the same year. Unlike the Seattle fire, Spokane’s conflagration remains unexplained, which enables Leyna …
